Today, wireless local area network (“WLAN”) security is located in layer two (“L2”) and above. This allows the communication devices to be ASIC-based, but at the same time, L2 security allows anyone in the band to listen (eavesdrop) to the communication. While the contents/bits are garbled, anyone can listen, monitor the headers and attempt to break the payload encryption. Furthermore, the fact that the header is in the “clear” allows for traffic monitoring and analysis by an adversary, which is a significant breach in high security applications.
L2 technology is insufficient for some applications, such as Federal/homeland security, military applications, or the like. In today's world of volatile security, there is a need to create a point-to-point secure tunnel to hide the headers as well as the payload. Moreover, one must be able to update/change security on the fly to react to threats when they occur.
Thus, there exists a need for providing point-to-point encryption in a communication system.